Search Engines and Directories

Tuning Your Web Pages - the Body

Headings

Now we're getting into the part of the page that both humans and robots read. Here's an example of what the body of a very simple web page looks like:

Note the word Heading in the example above. That word is enclosed in heading tags: <h1></h1>. There are six levels of heading tags in HTML: h1 through h6. Most search engines consider the words in headings to be extremely important, particularly h1. Try to get each of your top keywords into a heading on your page. They don't all have to be in the same one, they don't all have to be at the top of the page, and the headings should be an assortment of h1, h2, and h3. If you can only use one of these, make it an h1.

Each header tag is considered separately, so you can use each keyword up to twice in an h1 tag without problems. The same goes with h2 and h3. Don't use too many of these tags, though, and don't use the same text in multiple tags. If you need to do more than that, consider splitting your page into two or more pages. If you have more than two h1 tags on a page, your page is likely too large anyway. Note that I have used one h1 tag on each of these pages, and (generally) one or two h2s.

If this messes up your page too much, consider using your stylesheet to make the tags look the way you like. For example, add this to your stylesheet:

That will make all of the headings look the same. Feel free to make whatever changes you need to match your site. Just don't go too far with this -- please read my Dubious Tricks page for more on what is safe to do here.

Body Text

The regular text on your page should already contain your top keywords. If it doesn't, something is wrong here. Didn't you say that these are the most important? If you've just discovered that you left something important out of your site, this would be a great time to do a bit of a rewrite. Use those keywords in a sentence. This is what your web page is all about, so go talk about it.

This is one place where it is safe to use your keywords multiple times -- depending on the size of your page. The search engines will consider the importance of your keywords here as a percentage of the total words on your page. If the page is only one short paragraph, you should only use your keywords one or two times. If it is very wordy, you will need to use them a lot more frequently. Again, it is better here to have several small pages rather than on large one. It's generally better for your human readers as well, so this may be a good time to split up some of those huge pages.

Links and URLs

Your page probably has a few links to your other pages. Links look like the one in the example above: <a href="index.html">link</a>. You probably know where they all are by now. Again, many search engines consider the text in a link to be important. If you've already used your keywords as links, you get a gold star. If you haven't, see if you can sneak a few in here and there.

Links are becoming more important, so I'll be covering more on this on page six of this article.

Search engines used to consider keywords in the URL as important. This trick has been used so often by spammers that it is now ignored by the major search engines. If you don't understand this, don't worry -- you don't need it.

Alternate Text for Images

It's considered polite to put in text to serve as an alternate for your graphics. This allows people who can't see your images to get a better idea of what your page is about. If you haven't done this, I advise you to add the alt tags. Again, there's one of these in the example above. It looks like this: <img src="../graphics/general/button.gif" alt="Button">. Put your description of your image inside those quotes, in place of the word "button".

Alt tags are another place where search engines look for keywords. You should be able to find a place for your keywords in some of the images on your page. If you have an image that doesn't relate to any of your keywords, then you probably should either get rid of the image or add a keyword to your list.

Again, don't dump keywords in where they don't make sense, and don't do this for images that the keywords are really not related to. Just make sure that they don't confuse a visitor who can't see your images. That's good advise for the rest of your site as well.

Bold and Italic Text

Some search engines also consider words in bold or italic type to be more important. I've used bold text for some important words on this page. Try to bold some of your keywords; it can't hurt.

I personally don't like to use italics very much. Do this if you can, and ignore it if you think it will mess up your page. If you really want to use italics, but hate the way they look, you can also use the stylesheet trick to alter the italics tags to make these more readable. Your choice.

The Rest of Your Pages

Whew! Well, that takes care of your front page. For a simple web site with only a few keywords, that's probably enough. However, if you're one of those with multiple keyword lists, you should plan on going through the tricks in this article with each of your secondary pages. You may want to read what else I have in store for you first. Your choice.

Tricks and Cheats

You may have heard stories of some of the tricks that the big commercial websites use to get highly ranked on the major search engines. Well, those stories are probably all true, and a bunch more besides. If you are curious, I'm going to summarize some of these Dubious Tricks. I don't recommend that you use any of these cheats - exactly the opposite - they are there to prevent you from doing some of these unknowingly, and maybe to satisfy your curiosity.

Next:

How to invite a spider to your site.